Twitter direct messages

Four and a half years ago we released several Twitter features, one of those being to receive alerts via direct message on Twitter. This has been an awesome feature and we have used it ourselves since day one, to be notified of certain goals happening on our site, such as a new paying customer. Earlier this year we released our uptime monitoring feature, and we added Twitter direct message alerts there also.

So we are sad to say that today, these features have been removed, and it's unlikely they will ever come back.

Sometime in mid-October, Twitter added some pretty strict throttling. We never saw any "news" about this, but within a few days we started getting tweets and emails about Twitter alerts no longer working. A bit of research led us to this page on Twitter's web site, which says that all accounts are now limited to sending 250 direct messages per day, whether via the API or not.

We send many many thousands of direct messages a day, hence this feature is now severely broken. We blow through 250 direct messages by 1 AM most days. So unless Twitter revises this limit to something much higher, this feature is permanently dead.

Many other services have probably been affected by this throttle. It just really bothers me how much Twitter keeps slapping third party developers in the face, the very people who helped build Twitter into what it is today. One thing I know, we will never add another Twitter feature to Clicky, ever. Our Twitter analytics feature still works, thankfully. For now, anyways...

Reader Comments

Maybe some clever person could figure out a IFTTT recipe that could do that maybe bypass the Twitter restrictions

Steven Hodson Nov 11 2013 4:14pm

Have you guys thought about integrating the OATH from Twitter into Clicky so that the account making the API is actually that of the end-user rather than your account? Or am I misinterpreting something? But if you store the OATH token / secret for each domain name that happens to have a Twitter account, then the DM would be coming from their account instead of yours (I think)?

Shaun Peet Nov 11 2013 8:40pm

Yeah I had thought of that and it wouldn't work, even if it did it would look weird to get a DM from yourself (which probably isn't even possible)

Sean (Clicky) Nov 12 2013 10:49am

First Google search result:

http://www.wikihow.com/Send-a-Direct-Message-to-Yourself-on-Twitter

Shaun Peet Nov 13 2013 8:06am

Just tested that - sending DMs to yourself is actually possible.

Doing the OAUTH stuff isn't all that hard either, but it's up to you if you want to spend time on it. You'll probably want to make it domain-specific rather than account-specific so that large accounts like ours don't run into the same problem as you had.

Shaun Peet Nov 13 2013 8:12am

What do you mean by "domain specific"?

Sean (Clicky) Nov 13 2013 10:34am

For example, my Clicky account has 240 domains in it, so if you were to authorize my account for all domains within it, the DM would come from my account for all domains at it could hit the 250 limit pretty quickly too. So each domain basically needs to have its own Twitter account and then authenticate it at the domain level rather than the account level. While it's still possible that a single domain could hit the 250 limit, it's much less likely.

Shaun Peet Nov 13 2013 3:23pm

Let's try that again...

For example, my Clicky account has 240 domains in it, so if you were to authorize my Twitter account for all domains within it, the DM would come from my Twitter account for all domains and it could hit the 250 limit pretty quickly too. So each domain basically needs to have its own Twitter account and then authenticate it at the domain level in Clicky rather than the account level in Clicky. While it's still possible that a single domain in Clicky could hit the 250 limit for their own Twitter account, it's much less likely.

Shaun Peet Nov 13 2013 3:24pm

I see. Well that's something I'll consider if we add it back. It wouldn't be much harder to have the option to do site specific.

Sean (Clicky) Nov 14 2013 10:52am

Ah didn't know about this feature and now I want it hahahaha

Dade Williams Nov 15 2013 11:09am

I'm using Twitter direct messages for Pingdom too and it seems not te be problem.
There is one requirement, the ask you to follow @pingdomalert